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Monday, February 25, 2013

Yeah, Martha Is Good (Doctor Who)

When it comes to the hierarchy of Doctor Who companions, especially nuWho, Martha Jones tends to get
lost in the shuffle. She’s not hated, like Rose sometimes is, or adored, like
Rose sometimes is too. She’s not a champion for everyone, like Donna, or just
freakishly adorable, like Oswin. She isn’t the Doctor’s best friend, like Amy,
or blatantly nonplussed by the whole time-travel thing like Rory.

And she isn’t
Jack Harkness-y, like Jack Harkness, or perpetually undergoing an identity
crisis, like Mickey (who I do actually love).

Nope, Martha (played by the excellent Freema Agyeman) is
just good. Just plain good.

Allow me to explain.

Okay, for starters, I straight up refuse to explain what Doctor Who is again. If you really don’t
know, I recommend Wikipedia. But I warn you, it’s a long article.

Martha was the Doctor’s companion in the rather lackluster
third season of the new series. She followed after the aforementioned
polarizing Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), whose departure from the show at the end
of season two was pretty generally devastating. Martha was the show’s, and the
Doctor’s, rebound girl. And as such, we never really got to enjoy how awesome
she is.

In start contrast to nearly every single other companion of
nuWho (the revived series that came back on the air in 2005 after sixteen years
of cancellation), Martha Jones is not at a loss for her life. She’s actually
incredibly motivated. She’s a medical resident at a top hospital in London.
She’s upper middle class, brilliant, and incredibly brave. When the hospital
where she works is transported to the Moon as the result of an alien police
standoff (not one of their easier episodes to explain), Martha handles the
whole thing with grace, wit, and dignity.

She’s a great help to the Doctor, managing to find clues
that can solve the problem, and throws herself willingly and ably into the
world of aliens and kooky space problems. She’s not lost, she’s just looking to
explore a little.

Unfortunately for her, and I do truly believe the writers
did her a disservice here, Martha gets a crush on the Doctor. I mean, it’s
understandable I guess (not a huge fan of Tennant, but whatevs). He is the
Doctor. But after two seasons of out and out romance with Rose, the fans
weren’t ready for the Doctor to move on.

And neither was he. When I say that Martha was the Doctor’s
rebound, I mean that incredibly literally. He takes her to planets he visited
with Rose. He calls her Rose by accident. He talks about how much better it
would be if Rose were here. In one of my favorite lines of series three, when
they run into Jack and he asks about Rose, Martha says, “Oh, of course she’s
blonde!”

But here’s the catch: Martha is awesome. I mean really,
really awesome. She’s a truly spectacular person. As my evidence, I present the
two-part season finale (actually three parts, but I’m ignoring the first one –
shhh).

In this finale, the Doctor runs into his old frenemy, the
Master, literally at the end of the Universe. The Master thinks he’s human,
until he doesn’t anymore, and when he regenerates and remembers who he is, he
freaks out and goes back in time to our time to run for Prime Minister and mess
up everything. He also steals the TARDIS and calls the Doctor a few names.

Back in our time, the Master makes Martha, Jack and the
Doctor outcasts and hunts them. He then releases a deadly plague of angry alien
orb-things to destroy and enslave the Earth. He puts Jack (who cannot die)
under constant torture. The Doctor he keeps as his pet. But Martha escapes. She
teleports back down to an Earth in flames, and just starts walking.

It’s really that scene that gets me. Martha’s entire family
has been captured by the Master. The only people she can think of to get the
world out of this mess are captured or dead. She has nowhere to turn. And she
starts walking.

I’m being totally honest here, I’m pretty sure I would not
have done that.

It doesn’t stop there, either. The next episode zaps us a
year into the future. Earth is mostly destroyed, the Master is building an army
of warheads to declare war on the Universe, and everyone she loves is still in
captivity. But Martha’s still going.

In fact, she’s going better than ever. Instead of becoming
hardened by all the tragedy, Martha actually looks more beautiful than ever.
She’s not cynical, she’s determined. She’s literally walked across the entire
world, dodging aliens and patrols and the Master’s minions. She goes places no
one else will dare, and she just keeps going.

And then she gets captured.

Actually, that’s not even a fair assessment of the
situation. She more gives herself up. They have the block surrounded, but the
minions in question don’t actually know what Martha looks like. She could hide.
The people she’s with are perfectly willing to hide her. In fact, she’s such an
important figure to the resistance, that you know they would all rather die
than give her up.

Which is why she walks boldly into a street filled with guns
and basically says, “Take me to your leader.”

Holy crap.

Now, the rest of the episode is all about the cunning scheme
she and the Doctor came up with (and it gets a bit silly towards the end), but
the real beauty is, well, Martha. You see, we find out that she walked the
entire Earth, risking life and limb, not to get a weapon, or foster a violent
rebellion, or even trying to escape. Nope. She did it all to spread a message
of hope.

I can’t imagine being that brave on a good day, so it’s
incredible to me to imagine doing it simply to talk to people and tell them
about my hope. It is crazy. Flat out nuts. Insane.

I want that.

This is why I get so upset when people diss Martha, or,
worse, forget her. Yes, all the other companions are great too, but Martha
didn’t get to walk away from her problems. She wasn’t running alongside the
Doctor. No, she saved the world in his place. And she did it without guns, or
anger, or even a car. She told people about hope, and it saved the world.

And then, in the end, she decided to finish her residency,
take care of her family, and live her life on Earth. Not because she couldn’t
hack it in space. Because she didn’t have to. She’d already proved she could
hack anything put in front of her. Martha Jones has nothing to prove.

5 comments:

The NuWho writers are also fond of giving godmode upgrades to their companions; Rose and Donna got big ones, and while Moffat has backed off from it a bit, Amy, River, and it looks like Oswin all have metaphysically unique attributes. By contrast Martha did all her world-saving off of her own grit.

I do find the god-modding a little excessive, and Moffat's constant need to make his companions all mysterious and metaphysically "impossible" is super irritating. But I love that Donna was totes an awesome companion even before she got powers. Because she had the power of sass.

I never understood why so many fans dismiss Martha or actively dislike her. She was my favorite until Rory.

Doctor 10 may not be your thing but he was a lot of people's. So many fangirls gush over Ten and yet look down at Martha for having romantic/sexual feelings for him. I mean, come on. If the fans can feel it of course the woman that is experiencing him first hand might. She was actually getting to travel in the TARDIS with him and was kissed by him (for the greater good).

Why do people think S3 wasn't that great? It had so many of my favorite moments! How Gridlock was one huge Biblical metaphor/symbolization. The amazing Master (seriously, every scene with him) and his unhinged wife. The end of the universe. BLINK. William Shakespeare. The creepiness of how The Doctor dealt with the Family of Blood.

The parts of S3 that pissed me off could actually be seen as showing my love for Martha. She got stuck twice in racist/sexist time periods having to be a waitress and then a maid (nothing wrong with those occupations but she was training to be a medical doctor). And as a maid had to watch the guy that was treating her as a rebound fall in love with another blonde white woman, one that was racist/classist/sexist.